Professor Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is providing the first guest lecture for the new Glasgow Business History Seminar Series, an initiative established and funded by the Hunter Centre and the Department of Management at Strathclyde Business School and the Centre for Business History in Scotland, University of Glasgow, on January 31.
The initiative reflects the emergence of a growing international hub of business historians between the two institutions.
Entrepreneurial opportunities and the development of the cashless society
Everyone agrees that money matters. Indeed, a well-functioning capitalist economy relies on an efficient and effective payment system. But the matter of money is becoming increasingly hard to grasp. Online banking, mobile payments, contactless credit cards and the rise of digital currencies are reducing hard cash to a series of ones and zeroes stored and transmitted electronically and invisibly. The dematerialization of money has long given rise to utopian and dystopian visions of a cashless society that dates back to credit cards and the 1950s. These visions come from a variety of sources, such as technology evangelists, journalists, and policy makers. In this research we explore how, in the 1970s, what is today the Visa organization aimed to exploit the opportunities presented by the promise of the cashless world.
Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is Professor of Business history and Bank Management at Bangor University. He has written about ATMs, payment systems and computer in banking for international journals and magazines since 2000. He has been featured on BBC radio, participates in the Payment Systems Group at University of Cambridge, and has spoken at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
To book a place or for more information about the seminar series, please contact: